Location description parsing means to decompose a location description into several syntactical components and is typically performed by applying the grammatical rules by which such a description is composed. Location description parsing is often a key step for on-line services such as mapping and search tools to understand a user query and deliver relevant results for the query.
Location description parsing can often be very difficult because abbreviations for locations are commonly utilized, but there is not always a standardized way to abbreviate and not all users will use the same abbreviation. A location may also have several commonly used aliases that can be more well-known than the official name of the location. And, many different locations often have the same or similar names.
One major drawback of existing parsing systems is that they may produce too many false results for which no real-world meanings exist. Accordingly, in order to obtain a correct result, additional semantic analysis steps are typically applied after the parsing to improve accuracy and reduce the occurrence of false results. Semantic analysis attempts to figure out a sensible meaning for syntactical components through the application of various techniques. But because they represent additional steps, such analysis may often give rise to an efficiency problem and slow the responsiveness of the on-line service to the user's query. The situation is worse for Chinese and other Asian languages, since these languages do not have natural word boundaries, so there are many more possible ways for parsing systems to group a sequence of characters into a sequence of words in these languages as compared to English.
This Background is provided to introduce a brief context for the Summary and Detailed Description that follow. This Background is not intended to be an aid in determining the scope of the claimed subject matter nor be viewed as limiting the claimed subject matter to implementations that solve any or all of the disadvantages or problems presented above.